Project Lore

Less than 30 minutes after tickets went on sale for BlizzCon 2009 Saturday, they already were sold out. I was one of the lucky ones able to snag a pair for my husband and I. But thousands of people still were left in the ticket queue by the time they sold out. Thankfully this year, Blizzard is giving us another chance. A second batch of tickets goes up for sale in two weeks. And now we know exactly how the buying process goes.  Here's how I landed my tickets:

• About an hour before tickets went on sale at 10 a.m. PST, my husband and I both logged onto our individual Battle.net accounts and updated our payment options. The site seemed to be functioning fine as of that time. We went ahead to the Blizzard store page, which redirected us to the ticket sales page. We wanted to have the site loaded up well before the ticket sales began.
• Five minutes before the tickets went on sale, we started refreshing the  page every few seconds. My computer said 12:58 (since I'm on the east coast) when the site refreshed and went from saying "Tickets Unavailable" to "Select Quantity." You can only buy 5 tickets per mailing address.
• It took my computer about five seconds to refresh the page. By then, my husband already was in the queue at position 351. He entered the sales page almost immediately. I, on the other hand, got in the queue only seconds later and was at position 1,708, with an estimated 17-minute wait time. So those few seconds made a big difference.
• I did end up making it to the sales page around 1:15, but it didn't matter. By then, we already had our tickets.

But my time in the queue was interesting. Blizzard put a graphic on the page showing the percentage of tickets still remaining, so we could watch it drop several percentage points every minute. At 1:28 tickets for this round sold out. But by then, tens of thousands of people were waiting in the queue. So, what can we take away from this? If you're hoping to try again for tickets in the next round, get to the page early, and refresh starting a few minutes before the sale. If you get in the queue RIGHT away, you'll have a much better chance of scoring tickets. Both my husband and myself were able to get to the sales page since we entered the queue within seconds of it going up. And don't forget there's another way, too. If you want Grunty the murloc marine but can't attend, you still can watch parts of BlizzCon through pay per view. And, of course, we'll be bringing you the best of the convention here at Project Lore, too! So who else had luck with getting tickets so far? I'm curious how many others had a relatively smooth buying experience like I did. Any of you going to try for tickets on the 30th?

Click to read more ...